A-Haunting We Will Go (1942)

Stan and Ollie get involved with con men, crooks, a genial magician, and two interchangeable coffins with disastrous but funny results.

Director:

Alfred L. Werker

Writers:

Lou Breslow (screenplay), Lou Breslow (story),

Stars:

Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Dante

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Stan Laurel	...	Stan (as Laurel)
Oliver Hardy	...	Ollie (as Hardy)
Dante	...	Dante the Magician (as Dante the Magician)
Sheila Ryan	...	Margo
John Shelton	...	Tommy White
Don Costello	...	Doc Lake
Elisha Cook Jr.	...	Frank Lucas
Edward Gargan	...	Police Lt. Foster
Addison Richards	...	Attorney Malcolm Kilgore
George Lynn	...	Darby Mason
James Bush	...	Joe Morgan
Lou Lubin	...	Dixie Beeler
Robert Emmett Keane	...	Parker
Richard Lane	...	Phillips
Willie Best	...	Waiter

Storyline

The boys are recruited by a gang of thugs to get a coffin containing one of their far from dead colleagues to Dayton to try and get at an inheritance. After the coffin gets switched with the one Dante the Magician uses in his act, his stage show gets more than usually popular.

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Plot Keywords:

coffin | magician | con man | playing card | levitation | 

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Genres:

Comedy

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Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

7 August 1942 (USA)

Also Known As:

Dick und Doof als Geheimagenten beim FBI

Company Credits

Production Co:

Laurel and Hardy Feature Productions, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Technical Specs

Runtime:

68 min

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound System)

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Brenda Joyce's reluctance to appear in "A-Haunting We Will Go" led to the termination of her Fox contract. Her role was played by Sheila Ryan.

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Quotes

Oliver Hardy: [in reference to the con men they met on the train] Thank you! Two princes!
Stan Laurel: A pair of kings!
Parker: [referring to Stan and Ollie] A couple of jerks!

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Connections

References It Happened One Night (1934)

User Reviews

A-Haunting We Will Go is pretty amusing for a Fox L & H flick

Because of this Laurel and Hardy film's poor reputation, I decided to watch this with Scott MacGillivray's commentary first before seeing it without. With the commentary, I appreciated many of the visual gags like various accidents from Stan's umbrella or the entire rope trick with Stan rising and falling with it depending on Ollie's playing or not of the clarinet. Of note is that Sheila Ryan appears in her second L & H movie a year after her first with the boys, Great Guns. Also, a couple of men who bilk Stan and Ollie on the train, Richard Lane and Robert Emmett Keane, would subsequently appear with them on The Bullfighters (Lane), The Dancing Masters (Keane), and Jitterbugs (Keane). Anyone interested in African-American comics of the '40s will probably want to check this one out to see both Mantan Moreland and Wille Best as waiters on a train though Mantan makes more of an impression here when he laughs at the boys' obviously fake money they thought was real because of the machine they saw Lane and Keane make different dollar bills from that they bought. As a fan of It's a Wonderful Life, it was certainly a treat for me to see Frank Faylen (Ernie the taxi driver) try to throw L & H off the train. While Stan and Ollie do provide plenty of laughs especially in a scene concerning two telephone booths from Dante the Magician that provide some nice double exposure of them, the gangster scenes, with one of them being Elisa Cook, Jr. of The Maltese Falcon, are mostly too serious to suit a Laurel and Hardy flick. That lion segment with them was funny though. Compared to the boys' Hal Roach output, this Fox entry doesn't come close quality-wise but A-Haunting We Will Go shouldn't be considered bottom-of-the barrel either. P.S. One of the children that was admiring Dante on the train was Terry Moore, who later became the leading lady on Mighty Joe Young.